


Hurt/Comfort, Statue

by ChestnutJinx



Series: Writober 2018 [6]
Category: Infinite (Band)
Genre: Angst, Best Friends, Growing Up Together, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Personal Growth, Pining, Self-Discovery, Teenagers, fanwriterit, statue, writober2018
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-08
Updated: 2018-10-08
Packaged: 2019-07-28 07:36:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16237100
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChestnutJinx/pseuds/ChestnutJinx
Summary: Woohyun, the rich heir of a wealthy household, meets Sunggyu for the first time when he finds him in the park of his mansion, hiding behind a statue from some bullies with a huge scratch on his leg. Since then, they become best friends, and the statue becomes for them a place where they can expose their own vulnerable sides to the other and get comfort.Then, as they grow up together, they discover new, unknown feelings.





	Hurt/Comfort, Statue

It was an angel-shaped statue, the wings slightly open around the slender, androgynous body of the creature. The angel was looking down, their eyes half open to look at their empty hands. They looked sad, as if something had just slipped off its fingers, but their stance was straight, as if they didn’t really care about picking up whatever fell from their hands.

Woohyun had always thought that the statue looked incomplete like that, without anything in front of it. In that specific occasion, though, there was a boy huddled under those hands, apparently trying to make himself as small as possible. When he noticed Woohyun looking at him, though, his face got pale immediately.

Woohyun looked to the side, glancing at his house – the huge mansion that cast a shadow on that corner of the garden. There was nobody around. Then he glanced at the boy again, particularly at the bleeding scratch on his knee.

“You’re hurt!” he exclaimed, pointing at his leg. “Wait here, I’ll--”

“No!” The boy hissed. “I’m fine. Please don’t tell anyone I’m here.”

Puzzled, Woohyun got closer. “Why are you whispering?” he whispered back. “And why are you hiding?”

The boy shook his head and clicked his tongue. Apparently being asked those questions was exactly what he wanted to avoid. “I… I’ll tell you everything, okay? Just promise you won’t tell anyone I’m hiding here.”

Woohyun crossed his arms. “Then you promise me that you’ll let me treat your scratch.”

 

A quick promise from both parties, a fast run to the mansion to get the emergency kit and some reassurances about the treatment “not going to sting too much” later, Woohyun was dabbing gently some disinfectant on the boy’s wound.

“Why are you so good at this?” the boy mumbled after a good minute of both keeping quiet and staring at the wound getting cleaned.

“My nanny taught me how to treat myself when I get hurt, so she doesn’t have to do it herself,” Woohyun explained simply.

“Your nanny?” the boy repeated. “Why? You’re big enough, you don’t need one.”

Woohyun looked up and smiled, but didn’t answer. “What’s your name?” he asked instead.

The boy frowned. “I’m not telling you. Uncle always says that when you tell someone rich your name, they’re going to ruin your life.”

In that moment, those words hurt Woohyun deeper than he could have thought at the time. Later on, he could never forget them: they were one of the many things that made him and that strange boy so different from each other. For the time being, Woohyun just had to deal with a sudden, unexpected feeling of discomfort. It was the first time anyone talked about the wealth of his family as if it was something bad to avoid.

“Are you really not going to tell me?” he murmured softly as he put down the disinfectant and grabbed the gauze. “How do I ruin your life with your name?”

“You just will.” The boy looked at him in the eyes. “I don’t know! You’re the rich one, you tell me.”

“I don’t want to ruin your life,” Woohyun said. “I’m even treating your wound.”

The boy looked down for few seconds, apparently considering his options carefully. Then glared at Woohyun. “Okay. But you have to tell me your name too. And if you try to ruin my life, I’ll ruin you first.”

That was great news. “I’m Nam Woohyun!” Woohyun said happily, looking at him.

“I’m Kim Sunggyu.”

 

After that, the boy named Sunggyu took the habit of hiding in Woohyun’s garden, near the statue, every time he got wounds, taking advantage of the blind spots of the surveillance cameras to climb over the wall and jump in. Woohyun soon took on the habit to walk around the garden and check whether Sunggyu was there, bleeding from new wounds or merely hiding from anyone.

“They’re just a bunch of cowards, don’t pay attention to them. They are too afraid to fight me fairly, so they only pick on me when I’m alone and there’s at least five of them,” Sunggyu explained one day, but he didn’t look like he cared too much.

Of course, the trick of hiding in the garden only worked for the first four or five times before Woohyun’s nanny told him to just invite his friend inside, instead of making him sneak inside in secret.

‘Friend’. Woohyun realized he had made his first friend ever only after his nanny called Sunggyu that. When Sunggyu sneaked inside for the fifth time, Woohyun told him everything.

“Are we friends?” Woohyun asked in the end, looking at him carefully.

Sunggyu never told him much, but he told him enough to understand that he was in a difficult situation, and that he didn’t trust rich people. As a consequence, he didn’t trust Woohyun all that much, probably, and he definitely didn’t consider himself Woohyun’s friend.

“Why shouldn’t we?” Sunggyu said, looking back with a puzzled gaze. “How many wounds do I have to let you treat for me before I can call you a friend?”

Those words, so simply and honestly, were a huge relief for Woohyun, and marked the beginning of their friendship.

 

Woohyun’s parents weren’t as busy as one might think, but they were the kind of parents who treat their son as a shiny gold medal: something to be shown off at important events and to brag about with relevant people, but also something that is taken care of only when it’s useful, and left on a shelf or at the bottom of a drawer for the rest of the time. His mother loved to pick pretty clothing for him and neglected him whenever Woohyun was in need of any kind of support from his parents, so the role of parenting was quickly handed to his nanny since when he was a little kid. His father was probably only reminded of having a son whenever someone asked what would be his role in the company of the family.

Not too long after Sunggyu was first allowed in the mansion, Woohyun’s parents decided that keeping a nanny was infantilizing to their son, so she was fired. As a consequence – maybe casual, maybe just natural and obvious – Sunggyu became the main emotional support for the boy.

They went to different middle schools and Sunggyu was even a couple years older than him, but Woohyun never felt so at ease with anyone as much as he was with Sunggyu. With his parents he never felt like it was appropriate to talk about his feelings or his wishes, and they had never been curious. On the other hand, Sunggyu was always there for him, ready to hear about his troubles and his needs whenever. And Woohyun, of course, started to offer the same support to his friend, as much as he could.

So they talked to each other, quietly. And even though Sunggyu was allowed in the mansion and could just go inside whenever he wanted to, they always hid behind the statue to talk. It felt like that secret place, with just the stone angel listening, was the best place where to share hidden, delicate parts of themselves.

Sunggyu told Woohyun about how he was bullied for the most random reasons, which spaced from being too poor to be allowed to walk in certain parts of the city to having eyes that were too small. His parents were gone, and his uncle was training him to own his small stationery shop since when he was eight years old. In fact, Sunggyu wanted to become a singer and perform around the world.

“I know that it will never happen, of course. I’d need to be way luckier than what I am,” he murmured in the end with a bitter smile. “Still, sometimes I think about it a lot. It keeps me from sleeping at night.”

At first, upon hearing Sunggyu’s stories about himself, Woohyun had felt a bit shameful for wanting to share more about himself, thinking that probably his problems would seem stupid to Sunggyu, or that his wishes would feel greedy. In the end, he let it out little by little, squeezing against the side of his friend, as if saying it out loud was a painful process: his parents’ indifference to him, his piano lessons with a teacher who only wanted him to play famous songs from dead European musicians instead of letting him create anything new, how his classmates in the private school only went to his birthday parties because he was going to be an important connection to keep for their future and not because they genuinely liked him.

Instead of making fun of him, Sunggyu listened carefully, hugged him tight and complained with him about how awful it was, to be surrounded by people yet being completely alone. He cared, and despite not being able to relate nor to understand entirely, he could give Woohyun what he needed.

Friendship.

 

One evening, after cram school, an eighteen-years-old Sunggyu was leaning against the statue, too big to huddle on the pedestal anymore, his shoulders high with tension. He looked nervously from one side to another, and let out a small shout when Woohyun popped up.

“I just got back from cram school, you shouldn’t wait here alone all this time,” the boy objected. “Why don’t you show up in my house anymore?”

“...oh.” Sunggyu stared at him wide-eyed for a moment, before putting his hands in the pockets. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just wanted to stay here and relax, that’s all.”

“Here, next to _the angel_?” Woohyun smiled. His face was still a little round for his young age, but his body was developing fast. “Are you in the mood to confess something big? Our stony friend is dying to know, I’m sure.”

Sunggyu glared at him for the awful joke, but couldn’t help smiling wide. A bright smile that Woohyun hadn’t seen much lately. It lasted for a second, before disappearing behind the boy’s lips again.

“There is… a girl, at school. Her name is Yeonji.” He huffed. “I want to ask her out.”

 _So this is why he’s not looking at my face._ Woohyun, on the other hand, couldn’t stop looking at Sunggyu’s face: his cheeks slightly flushed, his eyes pointing obstinately in another direction, his shoulders still tense and his hands curled in his pockets. He had gotten taller than him – not that either of them was too tall, to be entirely honest, but a boy could dream – and now he looked more mature than the mischievous brat he used to be.

Woohyun was supposed to feel happy, but in that moment his head filled up with doubt. Who was this Yeonji girl, where did she pop up from? Why didn’t Sunggyu ever tell him about her? If she was so great that Sunggyu wanted to date her, how come he never told Woohyun about it? Even though he didn’t know about her, Woohyun was already not feeling right about this person. As if he knew that she had come up to cause trouble – even though, in theory, Sunggyu was the one who wanted to ask her out and not the other way around.

“Cool.” Woohyun smiled, trying to look reassuring. “Do you know how to do it already? What are you going to do?”

“Just…! You know. I’m just going to coolly ask her to meet after the school, someplace quiet where we won’t be disturbed.” Sunggyu nodded to himself, as if those words served more to convince himself than to explain his intentions to his best friend. “I’ll just tell her I have to talk to her before the first class, then we’ll meet behind the gym and I’ll confess.”

Woohyun nodded as well. That simple gesture suddenly felt completely out of place. “That’s great. Good luck for that,” he said in a flat tone.

Sunggyu glanced at him. “You don’t care at all, do you?” he asked, sounding a little hurt. “I just want a little support, that’s it.”

“I do care!” Woohyun said quickly, but he didn’t know what to say. His head was empty. What was the right thing to tell a best friend who just decided to confess his feelings to a girl he had never heard of? “Really.”

Sunggyu smiled, but it wasn’t a genuine smile. Woohyun could tell by the way his lips tensed around his teeth as he spoke again. “You don’t sound very convinced. What is it? You can tell me, we’re next to the angel.”

“I, uh.” Woohyun looked at his feet for a moment. “It’s nothing. It’s just that I never heard of her before, so it was a little unexpected. That’s it.”

“Do you think this is too rushed?” Sunggyu asked. He stopped looking away and started staring, as if all the shyness from before had vanished in an instant. “Maybe I should wait.”

Woohyun shook his head, but his breath barely came out when he spoke again. “No, not at all. You should ask her out! While you don’t do it, someone else will, right?”

He couldn’t understand what was wrong with himself. Why had words become so heavy on his tongue? Yet there he was, almost stuttering in Sunggyu’s face over some random girl he wanted to date. It wasn’t a big deal. _Right?_

“I hope she will accept,” he added, as if specifying it would make his words more convincing.

Sunggyu didn’t look much convinced, but in the end he gave a last, light nod, stepping away from the statue. “Sure. Tomorrow I’ll tell you how it went. You should go and have dinner now, you must be tired.”

Woohyun stepped away as well, a little confused. “Are you okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I? I feel great.” Sunggyu shrugged. “Tomorrow I’ll confess. I’m a little nervous, but it’s fine. It’s a good thing, after all.”

It made sense, but it was a strange way to put it: Woohyun didn’t know many people, but he was pretty sure he never heard anyone defining a confession to a crush ‘a good thing’. What about the sudden change of attitude? What was up with Sunggyu?

“Well,” Sunggyu said in a little sigh, “if I fail, it’ll be awful. But I have to try.”

He wanted to confess, but it sounded as if he had to do a chore. In his expression, though, Woohyun could see that he was actually pretty nervous about it.

He had to cheer him up.

“Good luck. If you’ll need me tomorrow, I’ll be waiting you here.” Woohyun pointed at the statue.

Sunggyu smiled. A real, grateful smile. He patted his shoulder. “Thanks. If it goes bad, I’ll need you more than ever.”

_What if it goes well? Will you still come here to see me? Will you still come to see me in the future, even though you have a girlfriend? Will you meet near another statue with her instead of me?_

Woohyun didn’t pay attention to the questions that popped up in his mind at that moment. It would have been silly to do so. His role was to cheer up Sunggyu and support him in what he wanted – that was the reason why they met under that statue to begin with. There was no harm in putting his selfish doubts aside for him.

 

The next day, Woohyun was more nervous than ever, unable to stay still and look at his books. For the whole morning his legs were shaking, his gaze constantly running to the clock on the wall as he waited for the school hours to be finally over. He had never been more impatient to leave the classroom before – okay, maybe that one time Sunggyu had invited him to go for a trip together and ended up in a karaoke room – and he almost planted his face in the floor while leaving the building, in a hurry to get to his own place.

It was already evening, of course, because Woohyun’s parents wanted him to take extra classes in order to get higher grades. Which also meant that Sunggyu was already there, under the statue, if the confession had gone wrong. Woohyun just ran, trying not to think about what he would have found once arrived: he didn’t know what could be worse.

As he went through the gate and turned left, running toward the small, hidden area of the park with the angel statue hidden among the bushes, he started to feel his lungs burning, but he didn’t care much. He was too much in a rush.

When he finally got there, he stopped abruptly and leaned on his knees, trying to catch his breath.

Sunggyu was there. Huddled right below the statue’s hands, crying quietly. It looked as if the angel desperately wanted to console him, but didn’t know how. He looked at Woohyun for a long moment, probably surprised to see him running there that fast, then he quickly turned the other way.

Woohyun had never seen him cry before, ever, and in that moment he just wished he would never see him like that ever again. He’d rather have Sunggyu abandon him and go away with a random girl.

But that wasn’t the moment for thinking about his own, silly jealousy for his friend.

“I’m here.” He was still out of breath. He stepped forward, but his legs were consumed by the race and he fell on his knees, his arms open.

Sunggyu sniffled and moved forward immediately, hugging him tight.

 

They stayed in the same position for the longest time. The sun set, leaving them in the dark, and Sunggyu’s breath was still uneven. Woohyun merely caressed his back, silent. He didn’t need to pry Sunggyu’s mind open: he could just wait for his friend to tell him what happened himself, if he really needed to.

“Everything went wrong,” the boy said in the end, after more and more minutes spent crying on Woohyun’s shoulder. “I couldn’t- it’s all ruined. I’m ruined.”

Woohyun kept cuddling him, pressed against his side, and said nothing.

“It’s all my fault.” Sunggyu sobbed. “I am a coward. I am useless and a coward. I couldn’t do it. She was there, I- I only needed to tell her to meet after school.”

So that was what happened. Woohyun pouted lightly, wondering why did Sunggyu react like that. He wasn’t the type to get nervous about something and break down in such a way. At all. If he simply couldn’t muster the courage to ask the girl out, he could still try the next day, or the day after. It wasn’t over. But Sunggyu probably knew already.

“I didn’t ask her. I will never do it,” Sunggyu was saying instead. Something so unlike him.

“You can still do it,” Woohyun murmured, unable to hold back. “It’s not over.”

“Yes it is” Sunggyu murmured back. “I don’t care.”

“Don’t be like this...”

“No, you- you don’t get it. I really don’t care. Seriously.”

Woohyun looked at him. His face was very close. He had stopped crying. “You don’t care?”

“About that girl, yeah. I don’t even like her. I don’t care about dating her.”

Woohyun knew Sunggyu enough to know that sometimes he liked to act as if something didn’t bother him, even when in fact it bothered him a lot. In that specific case, though, it felt different.

“But then… why?” Woohyun murmured, confused. “Why did you want to date her? You don’t even care. Why are you like this if you don’t care?”

What was he actually worrying for? What had Woohyun been thinking about the whole time? Was he really worried about something that Sunggyu didn’t even consider important nor relevant?

“I just… I-” Sunggyu took a deep breath. “I don’t want to say it.”

That hurt. Woohyun bit his lip. “Not even to me? I thought I was your best friend.”

“You are.” Sunggyu answered immediately, which was heartwarming, but his expression looked hesitant. “That’s why I don’t want to say it. You would hate me.”

“I would never.”

“You promise?” Sunggyu was staring. It had become a habit of his lately. “Can you assure me that you’ll never hate me, whatever I tell you?”

“Sunggyu, what is this about? You’re scaring me.”

Sunggyu bit his lip. Then lowered his head.

“Not yet. I’m sorry.”

Woohyun felt something cracking in his heart. _Ouch._

“I will tell you, I promise.” Sunggyu said, his voice a little louder. Probably to feel a little bolder. “When I’ll feel ready, I’ll definitely tell you. I never told anyone, and you’ll be the first person to ever know.”

It was nice, but also a little sad.

Woohyun wanted to console Sunggyu. Because he was clearly shaken and desperate for something, because he had cried in front of him for the first time, but also because that single event made Woohyun feel like he actually didn’t know Sunggyu at all. And he wanted to make up for it as soon as possible.

“Okay. Tell me when you’re ready.” Woohyun tried to smile. “Just know that I’m always ready to hear you out, okay? Really. So please don’t ever think that I would hate you for something.”

Sunggyu smiled back. “Of course. You’re the best friend I ever had.”

Woohyun kept hugging him for more time after that. They stayed there, the two of them in the dark and silence, just cuddling to soothe the pain away.

Woohyun felt the need for it as well. For the first time, hearing from Sunggyu that he was his best friend hurt him a tiny bit, but he didn’t know why.

**Author's Note:**

> The initial idea for this fic was actually different and pretty big! Which also explains why this oneshot got longer than I intended, and why it feels like the story is rushed and cut short. I'd love to go on, but it's a story I wanted to write for the Writober, so I have to keep it brief and go on.
> 
> Anyways! This is my first Woogyu and you can tell that I have no experience with this couple. I feel like I didn't express their dynamic too well. There's a first time for everything, but I wish I could have handled it better. Still hope you enjoyed, but I can't say I'm entirely satisfied with this.
> 
> The prompts were Hurt/Comfort and Statue, and I hope I did a good job. I put "mild hurt/comfort" in the tags because I don't think this is an actual hurt/comfort-- it doesn't focus on it enough to be called that, I'm afraid. The prompts were given by fanwriter.it, as usual. See you next time!


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